Major Rule Change for College Football's 2023 Season

 

The NCAA has made a major rule change for college football, beginning with the 2023 season.

For the first season since 1967, the game clock will continue to run, as it does in the NFL, when a team makes a first down on a play that ends inbounds, rather than stopping until the chains are set and the referee signals ready for play. The exception is during the last two minutes of the second and fourth quarters.

The primary rationale for the change was to cut the number of plays to reduce players’ potential injury exposures, not necessarily to shorten the nearly 3 1/2 hours it takes to play the average game.

The NCAA Football Rules Committee projects that the new rule will trim seven or eight plays from the average of about 180 per game in 2022. An eight-play reduction over a 12-game season would save 96 potential injury exposures per team, and there would be over 100 fewer exposures for teams that advance to the playoff.

The new rule will be used on every NCAA level except Division III, which was granted a request to delay its implementation until 2024.